Meanings and origins of sayings and phrases
Whether you want to resolve a friendly argument over how a saying or phrase originated or whether you just enjoy words, you'll probably find something here to interest you.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:25 PM 0 comments

 
Confrérie du Sabre d'Or | Art Of Sabrage
It is the art of opening a champagne bottle with a sword. How freaking cool is that?

1. Take a chilled bottle of champagne, not ice cold but suitable for drinking. The ideal temperature is around 37°F or 3°C
2. Carefully remove the wire around the cork. If the champagne has been properly chilled, the cork will remain in the bottle.

- posted by frank crist @ 2:22 PM 0 comments

 
Top Myths of Renaissance Martial Arts & Swords
From the article:

The diverse range of misconceptions and erroneous beliefs within historical fencing studies today is considerable. But there are perhaps some myths that are more common, and more pervasive, than others. This webpage presents an ongoing project that will continually try in an informal and condensed manner to help address some of these mistaken beliefs.

For example:

24. True rapiers could make lethal or debilitating edge cuts.

False. No historical rapier text teaches, implies, or expresses that edge blows with true rapiers, that is, the slender narrow blade forms developed in the 1570s or 1580s, killed by cut. Indeed, several historical sources specifically criticized these kind of rapiers for their lack of lethal cutting capacity. No historical accounts in the voluminous evidence of rapier combats describe rapiers as killing with cuts (or debilitating limbs by edge blows) but only as producing assorted lacerations and scratches.

- posted by frank crist @ 4:08 PM 0 comments

 
I.33 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I.33, also known as "the tower manuscript" because of its long stay in the Tower of London, is the earliest known surviving European treatise on the use of sword and buckler. The manuscript now resides in the collection of the Royal Armouries at Leeds, England. It is referred to as British Museum No. 14 E iii, No. 20, D. vi.

On 64 pages, the treatise shows a martial arts system of defensive and offensive techniques between a master and a pupil, referred to as sacerdos and scolaris, each armed with a sword and a buckler, drawn in ink and water colour and accompanied with Latin text, interspersed with German fencing terms. On the last two pages, the pupil is replaced by a woman called Walpurgis.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:44 PM 0 comments

 
List of United States military schools and academies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A handy list, which also includes a long list of defunct schools.
- posted by frank crist @ 3:09 PM 0 comments

 
Someone turn my chapters into a novel
So, it's a writing day over at the house today. Soren has joined us, and the three of us are sitting at the diningroom table working on our various theses. A.'s is on how one can see "whiteness" using the photography of Tina Barney. S.'s is on why and how melancholy characterizes the way we approach history today. Both of them are finishing M.A.s in modern art history, theory, and criticism. (That should probably all be in CAPS since it's the official title of their degree program.)

My thesis is a novel about an American scion who gets caught up with the Russian mafia during the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia. My M.F.A. is in Creative Writing.

In preparing to write, I began going through some old material that I thought I could reuse. In fact, I have tons of old material, and curiosity got the better of me: how much old material, exactly, did I have? Or, as a metric, how many pages have I thus written for this novel? I often quoted a figure of "over 500", but it's always been an estimate.

So I counted the pages. All pages are Courier, 12-point, double-spaced. Because of the volume, and because I'm not exactly doing a scientific study here, I counted all cover pages as a page (there are only a few), as well as counting partial pages as a complete page (at the end of a chapter, e.g.).

All totaled, and not including typed notes or journal entries about process or direction or synposes (I have more than a few) or one-pagers, since November 30, 2004, I have 564 pages towards this novel. I'm on the 5th draft.

IMHO, instead of wasting my time, sitting here and writing more pages, I think I'm going to go to Craig's List and place an ad, "Will pay money to put my chapters into novel form." Then, instead of shovelling money at my M.F.A. program, I could just pay an editor to do all of the work for me and publish the novel instead of graduate.

I think it's a great plan.
- posted by frank crist @ 7:03 PM 3 comments